SOURCE: Riegel, Christian. “Rosedale and Anti-Semitism in the House of Mirth.” Studies in American Fiction 20, no. 2 (autumn 1992): 219-24.

In the following essay, Riegel points out anti-Semitism in The House of Mirth, but notes that Wharton herself does not take an explicit stance in the novel.

Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth deals with the complex clash of old New York society, with all its inherent traditions and conventions, with the fast emerging and very wealthy new capitalist society. The new society, which Wharton termed the “invaders,” aspired to social acceptance by old New York. Although the old society resisted the incursion of this new society, “in a dollar world the biggest bank balance was bound to win.”¹ Together with large amounts of money, a man needed the right woman to complete his move into the leisure class of late nineteenth-century America: “unless the rich man also accumulate[d...